The Unsubstantial Air Page 5
Compared with such immediate opportunities for action, the belated U.S. Air Service had little to offer applicants. The will to build an air force was certainly present from the beginning: young men in their thousands swarmed to the recruiting offices (“there were at least 50,000 young Americans,” Bingham recalled, “all eager to become pilots”). Members of Congress were just as eager to give them the chance; in May, when the French premier, Alexandre Ribot, sent a cable asking (demanding, really) that the Americans provide five thousand pilots and forty-five hundred planes within a year, Congress agreed at once and appropriated $640 million—an unheard-of budget sum in those days—to pay for an “Air Program.”
But though enthusiasm for the Air Program was there, and Colonel Bingham’s plan was complete, there was not yet an actual working system turning out pilots. “The situation at that time, as to aviation,” General Pershing later wrote, “was such that every American ought to feel mortified to hear it mentioned.” Of the sixty-five officers and one thousand enlisted men in the Air Service when the United States declared war, only thirty-five knew how to fly, and except for five or six none was ready for combat flying or knew anything about antiaircraft guns, or bombs, or bombsights, or bomb racks. As for planes, the entire Air Service stock consisted of fifty-five trainers, unarmed and useless for combat; of those, fifty-one were obsolete, and the other four were obsolescent. When Pershing concluded, “We could not have put a single squadron in the field,” he was understating the situation; the air service could not have flown a single combat-ready plane into the war in the air.
Virtually no planes, then, and almost no pilots. And Pershing might have added: nowhere near enough training fields, or flight instructors, and no ground schools in which to teach eager young civilians how to be military as well as the principles of aeronautics; enlisting in the Air Service would be like joining the American League if the League had no bats, or balls, or ballparks, or anybody who knew how to play the game. Belatedness would always be part of the American story of the war; none of the brave promises to the French would be kept, and even at the Armistice Americans back home would still be constructing training fields to train more pilots who were no longer necessary, and no fighting plane of American design would have yet been built. Eagerness plus belatedness equals muddle, and muddle would be the condition of the U.S. Air Service, its training program and its squadrons, throughout the war.
The muddle began with enlistment. Even if you wanted to join the Air Service, it wasn’t at all clear, in those early months, how you did it. Douglas Campbell was a senior at Harvard in the spring of 1917. Like many other students, he had planned to join the ambulance service when he graduated, but once war was declared, he decided that he must play a more combatant role, and he turned toward aviation. It wasn’t easy, he later recalled: “Two or three of us were very interested in getting into the flying game, but we had a very difficult time for the first couple of weeks just trying to find out how to get into it. One weekend shortly after that, two other fellows and myself went to Washington to find out how to get into the air service.” What they found was a one-room office in a Washington building, manned by one captain and his secretary; it was here that the initial organization of the flying service was taking place. The captain told the young volunteers what was planned, took their names and addresses, and told them they’d be contacted. It all sounds so drab and bureaucratic, like applying for a tax return or a job in the post office. Where was the dream of being young and marching off to war? Where was the immediate action? Eagerness cried, “Take us now!” And the system answered, “We’ll be in touch.”
Finding out how to do it was only the beginning of the enlistment muddle. What were the rules and qualifications? To the candidates, they seemed to vary from place to place and day to day. How young was too young? How old was too old? What about a college education? Did you need a degree or only part of one? You had to take a physical, of course, but what would the necessary tests be? Eyes, surely, and your hearing, and weight and height and bend-over-and-spread-your-cheeks, but what else? They found that there was also the whirling chair. One candidate described that test in a letter home: “He [the examining doctor] gave us about ten minutes each of that most unpleasant testing. Whirled in the chair, then told to look at his finger, here and there. Whirled again, head down; told to sit up, but unable to do so. It turned out O.K. for us all, as we all reacted favorably and were duly dizzy.” He was proud to report that the semicircular canals in his ears had “proven of good quality”; in this new flier’s world, dizzy was good, and he had passed into that whirling world. A trick roller skater who took the test failed because he didn’t get dizzy; he was used to spinning, he did it all the time. Eventually, he was recognized as an exception and passed with the rest.
The new would-be pilots heard stories of older men already flying in the war who would never have passed the tests the young men were taking. Mick Mannock, the British ace, was said to have only one eye; another British flier named Carlin had only one leg (he tied his foot to the rudder pedal); Frank Alberty, an Australian, lost a leg on the Somme and learned to fly without it—well enough to shoot down seven German planes; William Thaw had a 20/80 left eye, defective hearing, and a bad knee, yet by the end of the war he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Service commanding the Third Air Group. The Air Service Medical Manual of 1918 acknowledged that service doctors had been aware of the existence of such rickety pilots when they planned the standard flight physical: “It was known that men had been able to fly in spite of one or more physical handicaps, such as having only one leg, having one eye, having tuberculosis, or being cross-eyed, or having one collapsed lung, or being well over 50 years of age. Instances were at hand of those so handicapped who had been able to learn to fly and to fly well.” Such men were already on active duty, and the Air Service needed all the pilots it could find. But in the future, when it selected the next batch of fliers, it would choose only those who were intact: one eye good, two eyes better.
The manual also worried about keeping the tests uniform. And well it might. Candidates knew, or at least believed, that the rules differed from one recruiting officer to another. If you failed the tests in Boston, you could go down to Hartford and try again.
What if you failed, and kept failing—in the eye test, say? Well, in those cases you could cheat; in the middle of enlistment, who would know? You could memorize the eye chart, or at the point in the test where you were asked to cover your good eye and test your bad one, you could peep between your fingers and test the good eye twice. Dudley Hill did that and passed into the Lafayette Flying Corps, where he had a distinguished one-eyed career. James Norman Hall, the Lafayette’s historian, praised Hill for his deception, as though cheating in the cause of flying were in itself heroic. (Hall himself had lied his way into the British army at the war’s beginning, presenting himself as a Canadian citizen when in fact he was American.) Other men lied on other subjects; John Grider claimed a college education he didn’t have, and nobody noticed.
If you were a young gentleman with family influence and money, you could use those advantages to bypass the muddle. Quentin Roosevelt was the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1917 the former president was surely the most influential man in America, and he was determined to use his influence and the force of his belligerent personality to thrust his four sons into the heart of the war that he was too old to fight in. He got what he wanted; within a few months all four were in uniform, commissioned, and headed for war zones: Archie became a captain in the infantry; Kermit was a captain first in the British and then in the American field artillery; Ted rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the infantry. And Quentin? With his weak eyes and his bad back (bad enough that he couldn’t take part in athletics at Harvard) he seemed an unlikely candidate for any fighting role, yet he, too, was commissioned—as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Service. (He was said to have memorized the eye chart.) Their father was very pleased. “I don’t b
elieve in all the United States,” he wrote in a letter at the time, “there is any father who has quite the same right that I have to be proud of his four sons.” One can’t help feeling that his pride was not so much in his sons for being brave as in himself for having begotten such men.
The muddle about qualifications and recruitment is perfectly understandable; military flying was a new kind of warfare, and especially in the United States. Air Service officers like Colonel Bingham simply had to guess what attributes and skills would make the ideal combat pilot. Two Harvard students offered themselves to the Air Service as specially desirable candidates on the grounds that they had driven both automobiles and motorcycles—as though these were unusual and valuable skills for a pilot to have in 1917. And maybe they were; maybe a young man who couldn’t drive a car would be hopeless as a pilot, and one who could would be an ace. Nobody knew. British medical officers took the opposite view; they considered that it might be better to seek out as prospective pilots men with no mechanical knowledge at all, on the grounds that when they got into combat, they wouldn’t always be listening to the engine for sinister noises. Other authorities argued that driving a machine along the ground simply wasn’t comparable to flying. “Many people,” a British flight commander wrote, “imagine that motoring or motor cycling forms an excellent apprenticeship to flying; but beyond the fact that these pastimes provide the learner with useful mechanical knowledge, they will not be found to be of particular value to the aviator. It is the man who has been accustomed to riding and outdoor games who proves quickest at picking up the feel of an aeroplane.” The American plane builder Glenn Curtiss agreed with that: he told Colonel Bingham that anyone who could ride horseback and sail a boat could learn to fly. It’s the country gentleman’s argument: flying is a field sport, and military aviation is simply the cavalry with a different mount under you.
The War Department agreed: it sent out letters to college and university presidents offering “Air Service Information for College Students” that began: “There has been a decided demand among college men of athletic attainments, particularly those in or nearing the draft age, for information about the Aviation Service.” The idea was to send information, including application forms, to “a selected list of the football players in your educational institution, as men of this class have not only exhibited a pronounced preference for the flying branch of the service, but have proven to be excellent material for training as aviators.”
Harvard’s president, Lowell, replied politely that he thought it very likely that his students might be interested in such materials. But two weeks later, when the same Air Service officers sent Lowell a set of articles for publication in the Harvard newspaper, Lowell frostily refused them. Harvard had already lost two-fifths of its undergraduate body, he wrote, and most of the rest were in military training on the campus. He thought it undesirable that more students should be taken out of college for aviation, “a service which can be recruited by selection from the conscript army.” That last clause must have rankled the brass hats down at Air Service headquarters. Lowell was saying, in his superior Cambridge way, that he didn’t want to waste his young men in flying jobs that any draftee could do; for him, pilots were truck drivers.
Still, the Air Service was right about what college athletes wanted; they enlisted in aviation in substantial numbers that spring. When ordinary students in flight schools wrote home, they mentioned the college sport stars who were among them: I’m flying, they said proudly, with Al Weatherhead, the Harvard quarterback, or Buck Church, the Yale end, or with George Moseley or Steve Philbin, both All-Americans at Yale, or Spuddy Pishon, the Dartmouth quarterback, or Mowatt Mitchell, captain of the Stanford football team, or Jimmy Vidal, captain of the University of Minnesota team, or Rabbit Curry, Vanderbilt’s All-American quarterback. It was as though by becoming the flying companions of such campus heroes, they had somehow made the first team.
These new recruits were young. Until this point in their lives the challenges they’d faced had been the kinds that college boys face: the big game, exams, the first drink, girls. War is going to be different: it will confront them with a series of grown-up tests requiring skill and quick judgment and above all physical courage. A boy who passes these tests will be a man. They think a lot about manhood and write home about it. Jack Wright, an ambulance driver from Phillips Andover, still only eighteen years old, leaves the ambulance service for aviation and writes to his mother: “I think, en plus, that I have at last a right to call myself a Man.”
All these tests will rank order them, like the A-to-F tests back in school—from exceptional at the top down through mere ordinariness, which would be like getting a C, to of no use at all, which would be flunking. Nobody wants to fail; nobody wants to be ordinary. And so, as they move through the test and the flight checks, each young man begins to form a conception of himself: I’m healthy. I have twenty-twenty eyes. I’m coordinated (some fellows aren’t). Maybe I’m one of the special ones; maybe I belong among pilots! Though, along with the exuberance of success, there must always be the companion fear: What if I’m not special? What if I fail the next test? Fear of failing isn’t a condition that Army doctors can examine, but it’s there, when you’re young. So George Moseley, the All-American, the perfect athlete-candidate, explains to his parents that he is going to take the tests for the Lafayette Escadrille because he feels that he should know whether he can be a flier or not. The tests, he explains,
consist of a severe physical exam on your nerves, heart, lungs, and eyes. Then a flying exam. You are taken up in an aeroplane for 100 minutes, so I understand; at first you are a passenger; then you are given the controls and the instructor or examiner tells you to fly the machine yourself. He sits beside you and corrects any mistakes which you may make. Then he takes the controls and does fancy things, to see if you can stand it.
As that last clause makes clear, Moseley is not simply describing a flight physical; this is a test of something more. In another letter of the same time he writes, “I am going to take these tests … because then I will be able to find out the truth about myself as far as flying is concerned.” The truth about myself, that’s what they’re all after: myself as a man.
Stuart Walcott is another would-be pilot who had to test himself in the air before he committed himself to flying. In May 1917 he went to the private flight school at Newport News, Virginia, to find out about himself. After his first flight there he wrote to his family with a kind of relief: “Flying from my first impression is a very fascinating game and the one I want to stay with for a while. I have signed up for 100 minutes in the air. While this hundred minutes will not make me a flier by any means I think it is well worth the while in that it gives me a little element of certainty in going abroad. I will know if all goes well that I am not unable to fly.”
There’s another, deeper fear that young men facing war feel: the fear of being afraid. What will I do when the bullets fly and the shells burst? Will I turn and run? Will I cower? Or will I act and not tremble? That fear must be especially present in a flying war, where the airplane itself, the instrument of war, is new and strange and dangerous. Unreflective flight candidates might regard the challenges of flight as simply a grander kind of sporting contest, the biggest big game, but for others, the sensitive, imaginative ones, it will be more than that.
Alan Winslow was a Yale junior in the spring of 1917 who was thinking about becoming a pilot. But he felt he had to test himself first. His own account of that testing, written fifteen years later, begins abruptly. He’s on a visit to New York with his friend Phil: “I was lying full length, face down, on a narrow window ledge of the Hotel Biltmore in New York. My fingers clutched the cold stone. I peered, terrified, at the street twenty-six stories below. I was fascinated. I wanted to hurl myself over the edge.” Phil has to drag him back into the hotel room by his legs. “What a hell of an aviator I’ll make!” Winslow thinks. “If I’m frightened with a solid window ledge beneath me … what
will happen when I’m actually up in the air?”
Phil suggests that maybe it will be different in a plane. The next day they travel to Newport News, where Winslow hires a flight instructor to take him up. As the Jenny takes off, he clutches the cockpit cowling, not daring to look over the side. But then he does and sees houses and fields sweeping past below him and feels no giddiness. He’s two thousand feet in the air, many times higher than the Biltmore ledge, why isn’t he scared? “Soon I had the answer,” he writes. “In an airplane there was nothing between me and the earth. There was no side of a building, no wall of a cliff to give me a relative sense of height—nothing to make me dizzy. Perhaps I could be a pilot after all.” His eagerness restored, Winslow returns to New York and sets about entering the muddle of flight training with all the other young men.
All war is a muddle; anyone who’s been touched by it knows that. For governments, war is confusion on a national and international scale: too many people trying to do things they don’t know how to do, too much matériel to be shifted from here to way over there, too many obstacles that nobody anticipated. On battlefields unpredictable things predictably happen: the weather changes, weapons don’t function, reinforcements don’t arrive, the enemy doesn’t behave the way he’s supposed to. Delays occur and throw the plan of attack off schedule. Commanders improvise or do nothing. It’s surprising anybody ever wins.
The muddle is worst at the start, as a nation accustomed to the conditions of peace tries to make a hasty transition to a state of war. Certainly that was true in the United States in 1917. Huge and complicated arrangements had to be made, right now. Arms factories and training camps had to be built, workers had to be recruited and war materials gathered, citizens had to be turned into soldiers. Promises to allies had to be kept, as in the case of the telegram that Ribot sent to the American government in May.